http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/19/why-i-am-becoming-a-jew-and-you-should-too
Is this something that the Labour Party are failing to acknowledge as part of their current make-up?
I looked at the comments on the article and I cannot improve on the following from David Pavett
'The premiss of this article is bizarre. If Nick Cohen wants to declare himself to be Jewish then that is up to him. He knows that this will not be accepted by orthodox Judaism. And, as an atheist he could not go through a conversion acceptable to orthodox Judaism. But if it is something he wants to say then that is his right. Similarly a person of Jewish descent can, if they wish, decide that he or she no longer want to be considered Jewish. The Israeli writer Shlomo Sand carefully explained this in his recent book How I Stopped Being a Jew.
Symbolic claims of identity with those on the receiving end of ethnic, racial or religious prejudice can send a useful message as with the "Je suis Charlie" slogan after the Charlie Hebdo murders. Real identity is another matter.
Taking racism seriously means, in my view, being strongly opposed those who use the charge of racism without substantiating it as a means of getting at people they don't like. Nick Cohen seems to come into that category. He has made a point over a long period of highlighting the blindness if some people on the left to the racist and misogynist views of people and groups with which they make common cause. That is often fair criticism. The problem has been his exaggeration of its extent, the view that it is a rot at the heart of left-wing politics rather than the poor judgement of a few individuals.
I have been active in left-wing politics for 50 years. I consider myself to be very sensitive to signs of ethnic and racial prejudice but in that time I have rarely encountered racist views among others on the left and when they have been expressed, or even just hinted at, they have been immediately jumped on by someone else. Opposing racism has always been a cause for the left and that is why I find so offensive the attempt by Nick Cohen (and Jonathan Freedland in yesterday's Guardian) to make out that the Labour Party (and the left in general) has a problem with Jews.
I agree with Owen Jones {in his Guardian article a few days ago) that if when the issue of anti-Semitism is raised someone responds by talking about Zionism and the wrongs of the Israeli government then that person has a problem with Jews. The thing is though that this reaction is confined to a tiny number of people. I have never come across it face to face but I have seen examples of it in writing. The editor of the Left Labour blog Left Futures (Jon Lansman) recently deleted an entire discussion thread following an article on anti-Semitism because three or four people had reacted in that way. Those same people react in crude and often offensive ways to virtually all discussions. The phenomenon is familiar to all followers of political blogs. It tells us nothing more than that there are are a small number of offensively stupid people who attach themselves to any political movement of the right or left.
What I find absurd about the claims of Nick Cohen and Jonathan Freedland is the animus with which they attack the left when they must know that they great majority on the left are clear-headedly opposed to racism and that this cannot be said with anything like the same confidence of the political right. They must know that the great majority of people involved in combating racism in all its forms at its various levels of expression by research, writing, speaking, demonstrating come from the left and not the right. That is why I find their articles on this subject reprehensible.'
